The present invention generally concerns information technology systems and, more particularly, systems for generating, formatting, scheduling, packaging, and distributing reports or extracts (data feeds).
The financial services industry relies heavily on reports and reporting services/systems as an important medium for communicating with clients and potential clients. The reports might communicate time critical information about investments, including a fund/portfolio performance, present market value, a summary of gains/losses, and other information in a user-friendly way.
The typical challenge faced by designers of large scale enterprise reporting systems in the financial services industry is trying to integrate a mixture of commercial vendor applications with home grown applications so that reporting can be done in flexible and scalable ways. Other challenges relate to licensing and scalability. Such reporting applications can range from ordinary spreadsheet based applications, to exclusive vendor report formatting applications (e.g., Crystal reports), to in-house applications. Such multi-application, multi-vendor approaches can be expensive, inflexible, and difficult to administer and maintain. Accordingly, an improved system is needed.